How Romney Talks

Romney’s God-fearing, impersonal G-words … reveal him as linguistically a person of another time, in which the public mood was cooler than today’s. That can be a good thing. Even Father Coughlin would not have called an earnest young woman, or anyone else, a slut on the radio. Yet the fact remains that there are few better ways to connote the air of a mannequin in 2012 than by saying gosh with a straight face.